You may remember that we shared a very clever video from community member Nick Harrison showing how he created a Christmas tree using modulated sine waves and Insight 2 from iZotope. In this article Nick shares how he did it. Over to you Nick…

To make a sine wave Christmas tree you'll need iZotope Insight (it can be the original Insight or the new Insight 2) a synthesizer plug-in, I like using Serum for this (and there is a free demo available) and a DAW. 

Here are the steps:

• Create a MIDI track, add your synth plug-in and set it to play a sine wave through a single oscillator 

• On the MIDI track, add a 20-second A6 (1760Hz) midi note, checking your synth plays that note.

• Set the synth's LFO to modulate the pitch of the oscillator (like an fast and exaggerated siren), set the oscillators rate to 1/32.

• Open an instance of iZotope Insight or Insight 2 on your master fader and set it to 3D Spectrogram view.

• In the MIDI track, draw in an automation line that automates the 'LFO amount' control from zero to around 50% over several seconds, and you'll see a sine wave triangle appear in Insight's spectrogram.

• This Christmas tree will be a big triangle with saw type edges, so adjust your 'LFO amount' automation line up and down to achieve the jagged edges of your triangle.

• You should now have a single colour tree, next to add the colour:

• Bounce your MIDI track audio and add it to an audio track, and duplicate the audio track 5 times (you should now have 5 identical audio tracks with your pitch modulated sine wave). Mute your MIDI track.

• If you have iZotope Insight 2, place an iZotope relay plug-in on each of the 5 audio tracks (or if you are using the original version of Insight, place a 'meter tap' on each of the audio tracks).

• The Relays (meter taps) make each of the 5 tracks colour assignable in Insights spectrogram, but currently, the audio tracks are all identical and the colours aren't ticked to show in Insight.

• Back in Insight, click the multiple button (top left) to open the relay colour selection tool below and set the relay colour selection tool as I've done - get creative and come up with new colours for your tree.

• Cut the audio clips in your audio tracks down to sixteenth notes chunks (equalling 4 clips per beat with the master tempo set to 120BPM) in the same way as I've done below.

• Press play and you should see your multicoloured spectrogram tree appear!

• From here you have the knowledge and skills to attempt the trunk, tree decorations, and possibly a star.

Good luck!

More Christmas Tree designs from Nick Harrison

Thank you Nick for sharing this. Who else fancies having a go?